Remembering Kyle Lake 20 Years Later

When Kyle Lake waded into the waters of baptism, preparing our congregation to bear witness to the transforming power of Jesus in the life of one of our own, we didn’t know it would be a core moment in our lives, in his, and in the life of our church. He didn’t walk out of the waters on our side of eternity. Instead, a terrible malfunction of the elements of the universe sent him running into the transforming arms of Jesus.

Many stories have been told and written about Kyle’s life, that moment, the moments leading up to it, and the years after, as we sought to make sense of our friend’s legacy and the tragedy that took him from us. This week, I’ve been thinking about the final year of his time on earth.

Community

He had been courted to replace the relatively famous pastor of a suburban church in the metropolitan region of a large Northeast city. He seriously considered it. But after several weeks of conversations and a visit, he determined his work in Waco and at University Baptist Church wasn’t complete.

Not long after his decision, he and I met at Tony Demaria’s, a legendary BBQ joint in East Waco known for all-you-can-eat ribs on Wednesday and a clientele that mirrors the city’s multigenerational, multi-class, and multicultural makeup. We stood in line behind two men.

One was an older Black man in overalls, perhaps taking a break from working one of the urban gardens emerging in the neighborhood. The other was a middle-aged white man in a suit, maybe a lawyer or a banker—who knows? They were in the middle of a deep conversation about the dogs they had owned and which ones were best for hunting.

Kyle turned to me with that colossal grin that could break darkness wide open and said, “I think I made the right decision.”

Joy

Around that time, he began convening some of the older members of the congregation to discuss our future together. As a church founded by and for college students, “older members” included those in our late 20s and early 30s. Kyle recognized, perhaps as a result of his decision to stay, that if the church was going to survive and thrive, we needed some people with more lines on their faces and higher lines of credit.

We also needed more children to grow up alongside his. 

The immediate result of this decision was that the church got older, by a little. It meant a few more graduate and seminary students were walking the halls of the building alongside the frat guys and sorority girls recovering from Saturday night.

But some of those graduate and seminary students stayed. They got jobs and had kids. And then their friends at those jobs, along with their kids, became interested in the wild and weird church that met in an old Safeway building on Dutton Avenue.

Our lot has changed significantly in the 20 years since Kyle’s death. We’ve made decisions, many of which have likely led others to wonder what he would think.

I could speculate. But I believe all our exercises in “what they would have thought” when it comes to the deceased are often just ploys, sometimes subconscious, to enact and defend our own agendas. We are better off waiting and asking them when we see them again, when none of it will have mattered anyway.

Still, I will take a leap and make a solid, declarative statement about something I am certain he would have loved.

Last week, our current pastor invited everyone to come to church dressed up in their Halloween costumes. We had several Spidermen and a Spiderwoman, a few Batmen, an Addams Family, a Scooby-Doo Crew, and several (what I’m told are) K-pop Demon Hunters. Children remained in the worship service, and it was a wild-and-woolly mess.

It was also holy. All I could think about were those meetings of the “old people” in our 20s and 30s in that upstairs room, led by the most charismatic and joyful person any of us had ever known. I don’t have to speculate what he would have thought about our Halloween worship service.

A few days later, a photo made its way onto my social media feed that took my breath away. It was of a young Batman walking down the front hallway of the church building. He had just passed the windows of what had been Kyle’s office and was next to the doorway that led up the stairs to the room where all those “old people” conversations had occurred.

It felt like a whisper from beyond.

Words of Blessing

Kyle’s benediction has traveled well across the years. It has legs for endurance. “As we approach this week, may we love God, embrace beauty, and live life to the fullest.”

He only began using those words in the last year or so of his life. Before then, he would send us out with a variation of, “May you go forth in the spirit of the one in whom we live and move and have our being.” It was a callback to Paul’s conversation with the Athenians on Mars Hill in Acts 17, where the apostle pointed to something that others may have seen as profane or “secular” and reminded us that it all belongs to God.

Both blessings really say the same thing, a reality seen only by those who pay attention. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” is how Gerard Manley Hopkins put it.

UBC’s first patron saint, St. Francis, praised God, whom he saw revealed to us in “Brother Sun and Sister Moon.” And from our other patron saint, Fred Rogers: “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is.”

And so may you go forth today in the spirit of the one in whom we live and move and have our being. And, above all else, may you love God, embrace beauty, and live life to the fullest.